


Careful Application of External Pressure

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Gen, M/M, POV Outsider, no infidelity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2019-09-30 18:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17228714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: “As far as I know Nick is straight.”“Huh,” Wu said, thoughtful and not sounding particularly convinced as he glanced back over to the little three-man show near the door.“‘Huh,’” Hank mimicked, unflatteringly. “What’s ‘huh?’”Wu shrugged and tilted his head.“Nothing really,” he said easily. “Just, the way he’s vibing with tall, dark, and irritated over there suggests otherwise.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Y’all were so lovely commenting on the first little ficlet I did for this tiny fandom (to which I have arrived tragically late) and mentioned that you might like to see some long-form fic from me dealing with Nick and Monroe and the star-crossed love that dare not speak its name. I have two novel-length fics I really want to write, but I wanted to cut my teeth on something smaller first and one of my favorite ways to explore romances is to look at them from an outside perspective.
> 
> Lo, I give you what is essentially a 5+1 fic centered around Hank wondering what the hell is up with Nick and the weird clockmaker. With bonus Wu, because he’s a gift, and eventually featuring the kind of healthy discussion of Nick and Juliette’s relationship that should have happened on the show because that’s my kink.
> 
> I don’t have a schedule for this but my goal is to post something every week in 2019, so since it’s one of three stories on my main rotation (and also since I love these characters a lot) you can expect to see it update fairly frequently. As with most 5+1 fic, I anticipate it being 6 or so chapters in length, but we’ll see where this road takes us.
> 
> Not really beta-read, as I’m trying to embrace writing for fun. That said, please feel free to let me know about any typos or missteps I might’ve missed.

It was a funny coincidence, Hank thought, that Clock Guy, of all people, wandered into the precinct to collect their wayward home explosion survivor. Things lined up like that sometimes. Suspicious enough to pique his detective’s interest but lacking any greater pattern that hooked into his gut and set his instincts baying.

It was clear that Lasser recognized the guy, at least, and after all, Portland wasn’t _that_ big a city. What was more unexpected was the way Nick’s attention snapped to Clock Guy, sharp and immediate, the moment Nick realized he was there. Though, Hank considered, that wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary.

Nick had always been laser-focused, and suspects stuck with you, sometimes, even if they weren’t guilty. Or in some cases _especially_ if they weren’t guilty, though it didn’t seem like remorse or guilt that had Nick’s gaze pinned to Clock Guy like it was stuck there with some kind of magnet.

It could be that he still suspected the guy was an accomplice to the kidnapping. If he did he hadn’t mentioned it, and Nick had never been one to keep his theories close to the vest. Between his woefully underdeveloped poker face and his constant need for validation, he wouldn’t have succeeded much even if he’d tried. Hank didn’t much mind either trait, as they made Nick a better, more trustworthy partner at the end of the day - it was difficult to worry about betrayal when the guy you depended on to have your back was almost physically incapable of lying to you, after all.

It could be that Nick thought Clock Guy was guilty of something else entirely, or, likelier still, he might have just given Nick the creeps. He seemed pretty harmless to Hank. A little weird, a little sad maybe, but not dangerous, or suspicious enough to merit any hesitation in remanding their victim into his custody. Still, he must have done _something_ to get under Nick’s skin back when they busted the serial kidnapper with the red jacket fetish. Even if Nick had never copped to what, precisely, had made the guy stick out in the first place, he didn’t often make mistakes in matters of human nature.

It was an innate talent Nick had carried with him the day he strolled in from the academy carting sixty pounds of gear on his uniform belt with big blue eyes and cheekbones that could cut glass, instincts already honed to a razor edge. Some of the other guys had given Hank shit at first for being paired up with the pretty-boy, but after seeing Nick’s sixth sense, or whatever, in action a few times, Hank had made a point to shut down any sly cracks made at Nick’s expense as much as he could.

Whatever it was about Clock Guy that had caught Nick’s interest, it had him unwilling, or unable, to even spare a glance over his shoulder as he assured Hank he’d take care of Lasser’s hand-off. Hank watched him go and gave Clock Guy a careful, surreptitious once-over from behind his desk. He might not have Nick’s almost preternatural abilities to pick up on troublesome cues, but he wasn’t exactly a slouch in the investigation department, either. Maybe he’d overlooked something last time in all the hullabaloo. After all, he’d thought the red jacket guy was perfectly normal, if a little Stepford, until he started humming.

Clock Guy was just as tall as Hank remembered, in a gray shirt and yuppy plaid button-down, looking vaguely harassed even as he lifted a hand in an aborted half-wave in their direction. The disgruntled expression stuck all the way through Lasser bounding over like a Labrador puppy, wrapping him up in an enthusiastic full-body hug, and spinning him in an awkward circle. While Lasser definitely seemed like the type to kamikaze-embrace a total stranger, Clock Guy tucked his feet up like he was used to it, even if he didn’t seem happy about it, so Hank supposed Lasser’s claims of their friendship must be true.

They were too far away for Hank to hear what Nick was saying to the guy, or vice versa, but body language was a pretty eloquent tongue all on its own. Nick looked about like he always did, standing easy and confident, giving an occasional nod for emphasis as he explained Lasser’s situation. It was a little strange, how his whole body angled toward Clock Guy - as if he were magnetic north to Nick’s compass needle - but it didn’t quite ring any alarm bells.

What was stranger was Clock Guy’s reaction. Contrary to most people when approached by an officer of the law, the tension in Clock Guy’s shoulders seemed to unspool as Nick drew near rather than ratcheting tighter. Definitely weird, particularly given that Clock Guy had been wrongfully fingered as a suspect in a major crime by none other than Nick himself, but still not exactly damning. And anyway, Nick had said he apologized to the guy so maybe it was just the relief of finding a familiar face in a stressful circumstance, even if that face had once accused him of kidnapping a child he’d never laid a finger on.

“Did we know Nick was bisexual?”

Hank nearly jumped out of his seat, jerking a glare at Wu where he was half-bent at the waist, leaning over Hank’s shoulder and staring in the direction of the awkward reunion.

“Man,” Hank hissed, with a disparaging click of his tongue, “you keep sneaking up on people like that, you’re gonna give somebody in here a heart attack.”

Wu snorted and turned a flat, dry gaze on Hank.

“The way we go through red meat and doughnuts, nobody’s gonna need _my_ help to have a heart attack.” He smirked a little when Hank laughed and straightened up, crossing his arms over his chest. “For real, though. Nick? Switch-hitting? Yes or no?”

“Not that it would be your business, since anything told to me would have been in confidence,” Hank said pointedly, while Wu rolled his eyes and circled his hand in a lazy ‘go on’ gesture, “but as far as I know Nick is straight.”

“Huh,” Wu said, thoughtful and not sounding particularly convinced as he glanced back over to the little three-man show near the door.

“‘Huh,’” Hank mimicked, unflatteringly. “What’s ‘huh?’”

Wu shrugged and tilted his head.

“Nothing really,” he said easily. “Just, the way he’s vibing with tall, dark, and irritated over there suggests otherwise.”

Hank turned to look, and sure enough, sometime in the last minute Nick had moved in even closer to Clock Guy. He had one hand curled, proprietary, around Clock Guy’s bicep and he was tilting his head in that way he did when he got all intense about a hunch - eyes wide and somehow bluer than normal, full of righteous certainty. It was like staring down a puppy with a holy commitment to justice, made it damn near impossible to turn down any request Nick elected to make. To Clock Guy’s credit, he was wearing the vaguely pissed-off expression of a man who knew damn well he was being deliberately manipulated, even if he also knew he was eventually going to crumple under the will of said manipulator like wet tissue.

“Huh,” Hank found himself saying, because that kind of physicality wasn’t something Nick usually indulged with strangers. He was a pretty standoffish guy, for all the model good looks; never much for casual contact beyond moments of crisis, or with people he knew intimately. And that right there? That was the kind of thing he’d do with Hank, but generally only under mild duress.

“Right?” Wu agreed. Hank looked over at him. Wu raised his eyebrows, made a weird, wiggly gesture with the fingers of one hand, and said intently, “ _Vibe_.”

“Vibe or no vibe, I still don’t see why you care,” Hank diverted clumsily, feeling off-balance and strangely guilty.

He couldn’t be talking about Nick behind his back, he reasoned, because as far as he knew there was nothing to talk about. He busied himself tidying his desk to get his mind off of the vague sense of wrongdoing, shuffling some files into a slightly neater stack and scooping up a few scattered writing utensils to deposit them into the metal cup beside his computer monitor.

“I have kind of a bet going with Rickie in Records,” Wu explained, throwing his hands up in defense when Hank slanted a glare at him, offended on Nick’s behalf. He added hastily, “Not about anyone in particular! Just, if at least twenty people in the precinct bat for our team, she owes me a hundred bucks.”

“A hundred bucks?” Hank parroted skeptically.

“Five per head,” Wu nodded. “This would put me right on the money.”

“Who’s on what money?”

For the second time in five minutes, Hank nearly went over backward. When he wheeled around, Nick was wearing that smug little smirk that said he knew he was being a shit and was entirely too pleased with himself for it.

“I’m gonna bell this whole goddamn department,” Hank grumbled, while Wu huffed a laugh and Nick grinned even wider. “No one’s on any money. Wu’s just a bad detective.”

“Hey!” Wu protested. “I resemble that remark.” He grinned in that dry way he had, while Hank snorted and rolled his eyes. Across the desk, Nick chuckled and dropped lazily into his seat.

“See you fellas later,” Wu said, meandering back toward the hallway. He wagged a finger at Hank and added, “Think about it! If it turns out I’m right, I’ll split the pot. 80-20.”

Hank opened his mouth to tell Wu politely to fuck off but what came out instead was, “60-40 or no deal!”

Wu laughed and cheerfully flipped him the bird as he disappeared around the corner, undoubtedly off to harangue some other unsuspecting government employee about something vaguely uncomfortable and inappropriate.

“What was that all about?” Nick asked, all companionable curiosity. Hank shook his head.

“Nothing,” he assured. “Just Wu being Wu. Lasser all taken care of?”

Nick nodded.

“For now,” he sighed. Hank could commiserate - there were few things more frustrating than having potential victims who refused to or were otherwise incapable of recognizing the danger they were actually in, and Hap Lasser wasn’t what Hank would call an attentive sort. “Monroe - that is, uh - _Mr. Monroe_ is gonna look after him until other arrangements can be made.”

Monroe, right. He knew Clock Guy’s name had been vaguely old Hollywood, though he couldn’t have remembered it for the life of him. The title tripped oddly off of Nick’s tongue, awkward and almost clumsy. Certainly not with the level of familiarity that hand on the arm had suggested.

Stranger and stranger.

“We still planning to talk to the arson inspector?” Nick asked, cutting into Hank’s line of thought. He was shrugging into his jacket and staring expectantly at Hank past his computer.

“Yeah,” Hank said. “So, get movin’.”

Nick snorted, amused. “I’m not the one who just wasted ten minutes gossiping with Wu like a stay-at-home mom.”

Hank rolled his eyes, and managed not to make any pointed statements about how he was surprised Nick had noticed, busy as he’d been intimately caressing a former suspect.

Instead he put on his most unimpressed face and drily announced, “Hashtag brunch life.”

He turned on his heel and strode purposefully across the bullpen with Nick’s laughter ringing at his back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Wait, wait, wait,” Hank mumbled, waving a hand as though it would clear Wu’s babbling from the air. “Monroe was with him when he found Holly?”
> 
> “Uh, yeah?” Wu said cautiously. “I’m pretty sure it was him. Unless Nick knows more than one scruffy beanpole that he likes to take on romantic moonlit walks through active crime scenes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point, I think it’s pretty clear that this fic is one part excuse to write goofy banter between Hank and Wu, and one part experiment to discover increasingly foolish ways to describe Monroe’s lesbian woodsman aesthetic.
> 
> Also I changed the title because I like this one better, but it will stay titled thusly going forward.
> 
> Not beta’ed because I’m just writing this for fun. Let me know if there are any serious typos or errors!
> 
> This bit takes place sometime off-screen during S1E07 “Let Your Hair Down,” because it’s patently ridiculous that not one single responding party noticed Monroe in the woods when Holly Clark was rescued.

Holly Clark was the kind of miracle that only happened on feel-good episodes of procedural crime TV shows. The kind of last-ditch Hail Mary that could restore even the most cynical cop’s beaten and battered faith in the justice system and its capacity to prevail. Grim and upsetting as things had been in the last few weeks, her rescue and return were a beacon of light that the Portland PD sorely needed, and they had elected to celebrate accordingly.

The whole station was alive with cheer and hope and joie de vivre despite the unconscionably late hour, toasting one another with hearty drams of bottom-shelf scotch in waxed paper coffee cups. Hank whooped along with an indiscernible chorus of hollering from a collection of uniformed officers loitering in the hallway and slung an arm around Nick’s shoulders where he was half-hidden in a decorative alcove. He’d been tucked away there for the better part of twenty minutes, oscillating between quiet delight and dazed disbelief every time Hank glanced over at him, as though he suspected this might all be a dream. It was possible the scotch had something to do with that, although neither of them had gotten much sleep during the last 72 hours, either.

“Shit, man,” Hank said jovially, in greeting.

“Yeah,” Nick agreed, huffing a little laugh and giving his head a quick, sharp shake. “Shit.”

He obligingly knocked the rim of his cup into Hank’s when Hank proffered it for a toast, taking a long swig and making a face. Nick was more of a Budweiser guy, most days, and he made no qualms about it. His plain, utilitarian taste dominated most aspects of his life, with the thankful exception of Juliette, who was enough of a spitfire to shake things up when they needed a good rattle even if her girl-next-door beauty played right into Nick’s quaintly all-American preferences. Real salt of the earth type, Nick.

“Thanks?” Nick said curiously, lifting an eyebrow and shooting Hank a smirk. “I think?”

Damn. He must have said that last part out loud. It might, Hank considered, be prudent to cut back on the scotch.

“So,” he rallied, pushing forward in the conversation as though he’d meant to share that observation all along, “what’s the hero of the hour doing squirreled away back here in the shadows, man?”

Nick laughed again, ducking his head, face flushing pink with the weird, bashful humility that seemed to kick into overdrive anytime he accomplished something he ought to be proud of and coerce him into dramatically downplaying his success. Hank hadn’t really had the chance to meet Nick’s much beloved Aunt Marie before she tragically passed, but it was depressingly endearing personality quirks like that one that made him suspect he might’ve had Words with her if they’d known one another.

“It was a team effort,” Nick demurred. Hank snorted.

“Yeah, Team Me, hitting the streets,” he agreed, tugging Nick in a little closer with the arm he had looped around his shoulders and giving him an affectionate shake, “and Team You, going full Eagle Scout out in the woods. How’d you even find her out there, anyway, man? You secretly into that survivalist shit or something?”

Nick stiffened under his arm for a split second, so brief that Hank wasn’t sure it even really happened, and said weakly, “I was just lucky.” He rolled his cup between his palms a couple of times and added, almost under his breath, “And, like I said, I had help.”

It could just be the standard prevarication of Nick’s WASPy repression, but something about the vaguely guilty way he said it made Hank’s professional curiosity - still dialed up to eleven after a couple of hard days’ work - sit up and take notice.

“Anybody I know?” He kept it short and concise. Nick may not have been much of a liar but he was a master of deflection. If Hank gave him room to maneuver, Nick would have him on his way with an impassioned tangent about teamwork and unity faster than Hank could realize he was being walked straight past his original point of inquiry.

“No, it was no one,” Nick blurted immediately, and this time there was no denying the tension tightening his posture, the slight flinch. If a suspect had pulled that same shit during questioning, it would be the proverbial blood in the water.

This wasn’t an interrogation, of course, and as close as they were, as much as he loved the guy, it wasn’t really Hank’s place to dig into Nick’s personal life uninvited, but something was going on, and Hank had never been able to back away when he thought there might be secrets to uncover. It was a bad habit that had cost him three marriages and a few friendships besides, but the sorry history of his indomitable curiosity wasn’t enough to keep Hank from watching Nick, calm and careful, and pressing, “So you were alone?”

“No, I - “ Nick started, sucking an irritated breath past his teeth and reaching up with one hand to push his dark fringe out of his face. “I asked a...a friend for some help. He’s good with, you know.” He made a little gesture with his free hand and then curled it back around his cup, drumming his fingers against the paper in a staccato burst. “Hiking and nature and stuff.”

“ _Real_ good,” Hank agreed appraisingly, eyebrows climbing toward his hairline. Holly Clark had been in those woods going on a decade without anyone finding her - good seemed to be a bit of an understatement. “What, is he part bloodhound or something?”

Nick laughed at that - the quick, sharp bark of true humor that only ever got startled out of him - and crowed delightedly, eyes shining, “Oh man, I’ve got to tell him you said that! He’s gonna _hate_ it.”

“You could always call him on down here, you know,” Hank said, tilting his cup back and forth so the scotch sloshed up toward the lip. “Plenty of booze to go around and I heard there might be pizza on order. Could be nice for the guy to enjoy the party he had a hand in making happen.”

“Ah,” Nick said, ducking his gaze away and scratching absently at the hinge of his jaw. Fidgety, nervous.

 _Lying_ , Hank realized with a sudden, queasy certainty.

“He’s not really into crowds,” Nick offered. It was a weak excuse, as they went, and Nick must have known it because he fell awkwardly silent, staring vacantly into the half-empty depths of his cup and pointedly not meeting Hank’s eyes.

“Maybe next time, then,” Hank said, conciliatory. Nick nodded.

“Sure,” he agreed, flashing a relieved grin up at Hank. “Next time.” He nearly jumped as his phone started ringing, wiggling his way out from under Hank’s arm and digging to free it from the interior pocket of his jacket.

He glanced down at the glowing screen, eyebrows lifting slightly before he thumbed it dark, tucking the phone in toward his chest like he was afraid Hank might crane his neck to try and read it.

“I gotta get going.” He held his cup out, tilting his head encouragingly and offering it in Hank’s direction. “You wanna kill this for me?”

Hank stared at him for a long second, unimpressed, until Nick wagged the cup enticingly back and forth. He rolled his eyes, reached out to snatch it, and peered inside. It was easily two-thirds of the way full, and Hank severely doubted that Nick had gotten up and refilled it at any point during the evening. He jabbed a finger at Nick over the rim of the cup and announced, “You’re a disgrace to this department.”

“Tell it to your hangover,” Nick replied jovially. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hank groused as Nick turned and started down the hallway, raising the phone to his ear with a soft salutation that Hank couldn’t quite hear. He had to lift his voice in a holler to add, “Tell Juliette I said hi!”

Nick looked over his shoulder, brows tucked together in confusion, and glanced from Hank to the phone and back again before his expression cleared.

“Sure, yeah!” he replied, flashing the smile that practically everyone swooned over. The real pretty one that didn’t quite touch his eyes.

He turned his attention back to the phone with an absent wave in Hank’s direction, tucking his shoulders in and carefully picking his way through the celebrants lining the corridor. While it might be technically accurate to say that Hank crept cautiously after him in the interest of eavesdropping on his conversation, he preferred to think of it as undertaking a semi-involuntary investigation in the interest of assuring his partner’s emotional and physical well-being.

It was possible, Hank reflected, that there was a reason Nick always stuck him with the reports.

“ - fine, I promise,” Nick was saying as Hank sidled casually up to linger behind couple of uniforms who had their arms slung around one another and were trading increasingly unintelligible declarations of platonic love. “We’ve got the guy in custody and she’s safe with her mom. She’s gonna be okay.”

He paused for a second, in his stride and in the conversation.

“Only when she has to come in to identify him, but it’s not face-to-face. He won’t even see her.” Another pause, and from this vantage point Hank could just barely make out a slight lift at one corner of Nick’s mouth.

He could picture the fond smirk clearly. He’d seen it directed at Juliette often enough, and occasionally at a particularly coveted cup of coffee when Nick was going a little loopy from sleep deprivation.

“I’ll be there the whole time. I won’t let the bastard near her, I swear.”

Nick huffed a little laugh at whatever his conversational partner said and dipped his head, half-nod, half-prevarication.

“I’m going to remind you of that next time you’re whining about me endangering your person,” he said easily, and started walking again.

It was simple enough to tail him to the stairwell, where the echo of his voice against the barren walls seemed to ring louder even than the background roar of the party in full swing.

“No, no. I just figured the big bad wolf would have more spine, is all.”

There was a sharp bark of laughter, moving almost out of range, and Hank fought the urge to lean further toward the staircase in fear of tipping over and rolling down it. He shuffled cautiously toward the top step, peering over the banister and ducking immediately back the second he caught sight of Nick’s dark head. He’d stopped again, loitering on the next landing down. His voice was quieter when he spoke next, but still easy enough for Hank to pick up on.

“You did good, Monroe. Seriously, I couldn’t have found her without you.”

A beat, and a mildly exasperated sigh.

“Uh-huh. Sure,” followed by a choked-off laugh. “If this is how you’re going to be about it, forget I said anything.”

An attentive pause.

“Was there a reason you called or is this just some weird blutbad tradition?” Pause again, shorter. “I don’t know, maybe every third Thursday you have to be rude to someone while they compliment you.”

Bloot-bahd? Hank formed his mouth carefully around the word, taking pains to ensure he wasn’t actually saying it out loud. He’d never heard the term before, but maybe Monroe was into one of those New Age hippie religions. He definitely seemed the type, though he clearly hadn’t appreciated Nick’s comment. Hank could hear the distant, staticky whine of his offended squawking from all the way up here.

There was the gentle scuff of a footstep against laminate and Nick drawled, “How _ever_ will I console myself, missing out on beet sausage?”

A pause.

“Yeah, I could eat. I mean, not beet sausage, but everything else sounds good. Besides, we should probably talk about - you know.”

There was an absent, metered burst of tapping, probably the sole of Nick’s shoe against the floor.

“I don’t know, maybe twenty minutes? Yeah, sure. Do you have any real beer in your fridge or is it all overpriced microbrews?”

Hank risked another peek, leaning over to see Nick’s figure begin bobbing placidly as he made his way down the staircase.

“Fine,” Nick said, voice fading. “Half an hour, then. And I’m serious about the sausage.” A hefty sigh. “Yeah, but you’re paying me back.”

As the conversation petered off with Nick insisting teasingly that he could be allergic to beets, for all Monroe knew, Hank wondered whether the booze or the unexpected revelation was more to blame for the way his head felt as if it had come free of his shoulders to spin circles in the air like a wobbling balloon. Nick was presumably on the way to eat dinner in the company of none other than the mysterious Monroe, with whom he had clearly struck up some kind of rapport over the last couple of months that was intimate enough to involve clandestine meetings over highly questionable meatless entrees. The information all sort of fizzled and warped in his head when he tried to look at it altogether, so Hank laid it out in his mind in a couple of short, simple inferences.

One: Nick was having dinner with Clock Guy, who he had apparently become close enough with to call Monroe with no small level of familiarity.

This wasn’t altogether worrisome, except that Nick’s roster of friends had never been exceptionally well-padded, and he hadn’t mentioned Monroe even in passing since the whole thing with the rogue arson inspector and the terrifyingly attractive redhead with a murder rap. Hank had sort of assumed that whatever fledgling acquaintanceship Nick and Monroe might have been working on had crumbled underneath the weight of all that drama, but clearly he was misinformed. It stung, surprisingly sharp.

While they didn’t necessarily talk a lot about their feelings, it was markedly out of character that Nick would fail to mention to Hank that his relationship with a suspected serial kidnapper had progressed beyond “we once shared a single awkward apology beer and made painful small talk about his bizarre obsession with vintage timepieces” to “we’re good enough buddies to stop by and chat over late night meals on busy weeknights when I haven’t seen my girlfriend for more than an hour in three days.” Not that Hank meant to judge, or anything. It just seemed like Nick’s priorities might be slightly askew, on that one.

Two: Monroe had helped Nick with the case.

This was by far the more troubling revelation, for a number of reasons. Firstly, and most egregiously, because it appeared that Nick had asked for Monroe’s help off the books. There were protocols in place to seek aid from relevant professionals and there was paperwork to ensure the protection and payment of criminal informants, all appropriately tracked and tidily cataloged to make it easier for the prosecution to keep to their end of the bargain and dole out judicially-approved punishment on deserving parties.

When you started playing fast and loose, like asking your drinking buddy to help you find a missing girl in the woods, the chain of evidence got sloppy, and that left loopholes for the defense to leverage to their advantage. That was how bad guys walked. Nick knew that, and was normally so scrupulously committed to following the aforementioned protocol that he sometimes came across as miserably uptight. It was unlike him to be so lax about any investigation, let alone one of such public prominence.

There was the slimmest of possibilities that Nick had loaded Monroe into the system as a CI back during the Lasser thing and forgotten to mention it, but it would be easy enough to check the records and Hank would put good money on Monroe’s name coming up only in reference to overdue parking tickets, if even that. From what little Hank had seen of him, he seemed like the kind of guy who was too uptight to let even his minor library fines go unresolved.

He downed the remaining scotch in his own coffee cup before turning his attention to the mostly-full glass Nick had left. Ambling absently back into the hallway, he considered that maybe the pressure of losing his aunt, putting off his proposal, and getting sucked into ever stranger cases was finally cutting cracks into Nick’s marbled exterior. It still didn’t explain why Nick had reached out to Clock Guy, of all people, to track a nearly decade-old trail through a stretch of frequently trodden forest, but there was only so much rationalizing Hank could do when he felt soaked in booze up to his eyeballs and exhausted, besides.

He spotted Wu a little way into the bullpen, balanced precariously on the edge of Capiletti’s desk and letting his legs dangle jovially in the air, swaying along with whatever Top 40 pop tune was piping tinnily over the station’s intercom system. He’d swapped his street blues for a matched set of PPD sweats that looked vaguely ridiculous, but still strangely worked. It appeared a surplus of charisma could make up for a multitude of sins.

“Yo,” Hank said awkwardly as he strolled up, forcing a casualness he didn’t quite feel, off-kilter as he was. Wu snorted, arching a deeply judgmental eyebrow.

“‘Yo,’” he mimicked, in a low, unflattering rasp. He wrinkled his nose in distaste while Hank rolled his eyes, and then continued in his normal tenor, “Is that a thing we’re doing now? Yo?”

He didn’t sound drunk, but his face was flushed ruddy and his eyes had the familiar glassy sheen of the decently inebriated.

“Nah, it didn’t really work for me,” Hank admitted. Wu nodded his agreement.

“Good call,” he approved.

Hank scooted in next to Wu and turned so that his back was to the desk, bracing one palm against its surface and leaning back into the point of contact. He could feel Wu watching him, though he couldn’t quite tell if the bland expression that kept swimming in and out of focus on Wu’s face was one of expectant patience or one of drunken absentia. He took a long, slow sip of Nick’s abandoned scotch in case of the former, mulling over what he wanted to say and how, exactly, he wanted to say it. Wu was a good guy, but he could occasionally be something of a gossipmonger and Hank was here out of concern for his partner, not to accidentally start some kind of weird rumors about him.

“So,” he blurted suddenly, and Wu blinked with polite attention. “You know Nick?”

It was, admittedly, not the best opening gambit Hank had ever delivered in his life, but the way that Wu’s eyebrows catapulted toward his buzzed hairline was a bit much.

“Nick Burkhardt?” Wu asked haltingly. Hank rolled his eyes.

“No, Nick Nolte,” he groused. “Yes, Nick Burkhardt! How many other Nicks you know walking around this precinct, man?”

Wu considered this for a long moment, swaying slightly from side to side as his gaze rolled thoughtfully toward the ceiling.

“Five,” he supplied decisively. Hank stared at him for probably longer than was necessary, and then sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Okay,” he ground past his teeth, “how many Nicks do you know that I would be coming to you to ask about?”

“Definitely just Burkhardt,” Wu agreed immediately. “You guys are like _this_.” He held up a hand, twining his middle and index fingers together with a low whistle, and then leaned in to add in a gratingly loud conspiratorial whisper, “Co-de-pen-dent.”

“Thanks,” Hank said flatly. Wu clapped a companionable palm over his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

“Anytime,” he assured pleasantly. “So, what’s up with Burkie Burke?”

“I don’t know,” Hank admitted, cutting his gaze away and focusing blearily on the boring laminate flooring, long since scuffed to hell and back. “Has he seemed...weird to you lately?”

Wu made a slightly garbled noise of consideration.

“Not any weirder than usual,” he offered, shrugging when Hank looked up, frowning in disappointment. “Sorry, man. Why do you ask?”

Hank shook his head.

“Just a feeling,” he said absently, mind spinning. Was it possible there was nothing strange going on with Nick at all? Maybe he was just being overly sensitive. After all, it wasn’t like Nick wasn’t allowed to make new friends, odd as they or their circumstances of association may be. Hank had never thought himself especially prone to histrionics over his platonic relationships, but maybe the stress of the case was getting to him, too.

“Is this about his boyfriend?”

Hank blinked slowly at Wu, brow furrowing in confusion as the question pushed through the gummy barrier of his internal musings, slow as pulled taffy.

“Boyfriend?” he repeated slowly. Wu snorted.

“Not literally,” he assured, and then flicked his gaze toward the ceiling, up-and-back in a quick moment of consideration. He wrinkled his nose, tilting his hand back and forth in a so-so gesture, and amended, “Or, maybe literally. If Nick was driving stick with anyone, dollars to doughnuts it’d be this guy.”

“Say what now?” Hank asked, head to one side, staring at Wu with no small amount of disbelief.

“The guy,” Wu said, rolling his eyes and waving an irritated hand, as though Hank should already know what guy he could possibly be alluding to. “You know the guy - tall, irritated? Dresses like a sixty year old lumberjack?”

“Monroe?” Hank squinted at Wu, who had gone slightly blurry around the edges.

“Could be,” Wu provided thoughtfully, scratching at his chin. “Nick’s never introduced us.” He snapped triumphantly, extending an index finger and aiming it at Hank’s chest with wobbly accuracy. “But! He had the guy with him when we went in to secure the scene, and let me tell you, dude is stronger than he looks.”

He wagged his eyebrows appreciatively.

“Carted Holly Clark a couple of miles through the woods in the middle of the night like it was nothing.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Hank mumbled, waving a hand as though it would clear Wu’s babbling from the air. “Monroe was with him when he found Holly?”

“Uh, yeah?” Wu said cautiously. “I’m pretty sure it was him. Unless Nick knows more than one scruffy beanpole that he likes to take on romantic moonlit walks through active crime scenes.”

Hank smiled a little at that, because while he was far from convinced that there was anything lascivious going on between his partner and the clock hippie, there was no denying that dragging an unsuspecting date through a barely defunct murder scene was exactly the kind of insane power move Nick might try to impress a girl. Or guy, in this case, Hank supposed, though he was some distance from buying the theory that Nick would make a move on anyone other than Juliette, especially while they were dating.

“What the hell was he thinking, dragging a civilian out there with him?” Hank wondered, absent and vaguely frustrated. “They could have been shot!”

Wu shrugged.

“Maybe Nick just likes the way he fills out his khakis, man,” he offered dryly. Hank glared at him, but Wu had long been immune to Hank’s scathing disapproval. He simply grinned and continued, “I’ve done worse to get close to a good ass.”

“First of all,” Hank insisted, though it all sort of slurred together into one mushy polysyllabic word, “I refuse to believe Monroe has an ass. You’ve seen the guy, right? He’s way too skinny to be rocking a quality caboose.”

“The heart wants what the heart wants,” Wu rebutted serenely. “Apparently Burkie’s heart wants an outdoorsy brunet built like an angry fencepost.”

Hank rolled his eyes again and reached over to shove irritably at Wu’s shoulder. Wu laughed, swaying to the side and back like one of those wobbling kids’ toys.

“Weeble,” Hank blurted aloud.

“There’s no need to be cruel,” Wu drawled admonishingly. He reached over, presumably to deliver a placating pat to Hank’s shoulder, but he veered at the last second into something that more closely resembled a slow and tender face-wash. “It’s okay, I know you’re just lashing out because Nick is replacing you with thrift-store Eddie Bauer.”

Hank shook Wu’s hand off and scowled at him.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” he snapped.

“Puffy vest,” Wu replied unhelpfully, waving his hand sluggishly in the air. “Thermal shirt. Flannel.”

“How drunk are you?” Hank asked, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. He’d assumed that the gentle rocking Wu was doing was a symptom of Hank’s own powers of vision slowly deteriorating with the application of alcohol, but now he wasn’t so sure.

“Drunk enough to know you’re deflecting,” Wu said, slowly easing himself into a supine position across Capiletti’s desk. His legs continued to dangle off the edge and he seemed remarkably unconcerned with the files, decorations, and office supplies therein. He wiggled for a second, then grunted and removed a stapler from the vicinity of his kidneys, slapping it sedately into Hank’s hand. “If you’re so curious about Nick’s mystery date, why don’t you just ask him?”

Hank considered this for a long moment. He opened his mouth. He shut it again.

Why _didn’t_ he just ask Nick?

 _Because_ _Nick_ _is_ _lying_ _to_ _me_ , his mind supplied immediately, with all the irate righteousness that terrible scotch could provide.

That wasn’t precisely true, though, Hank reasoned. Nick was certainly omitting a few things. Maybe even a lot of things, but it wasn’t like Hank had asked him about any of it to his face. He’d immediately jumped to cloak-and-dagger espionage, probably a little out of habit, but it wasn’t like Nick was some kind of criminal mastermind. He was Hank’s partner, Hank’s friend. If there was something going with him, it wasn’t Nick’s job to air his woes to Hank at Hank’s whim. In fact, if he thought his friend was acting weird, or maybe struggling with something, it was Hank’s responsibility, nay privilege, to ask him about it.

Nick wouldn’t be obligated to tell him anything, of course, but maybe if Hank opened that door, he would have the confidence to walk through on his own.

“Maybe I _will_ ask him,” he announced. His only response came in the form of a soft, high wheeze that stuttered into a choked-off snore.

Hank sighed, mustering as much derision as he could to glare down at Wu, who it seemed had nodded off sometime in the minute or so Hank had been considering his advice. He tucked the stapler into the crook of Wu’s elbow, gratified when Wu mumbled something unintelligible and curled around it like a child with a much-loved toy, rolling onto his side and drooling into what looked like a stack of freshly filled out arrest forms. Capiletti should have known better than to leave those out while the scotch was flowing.

Tomorrow, Hank thought blearily, swallowing down the rest of Nick’s abandoned booze and tossing the cup into a nearby wastebasket. Tomorrow, he would ask.

He turned on his heel, grabbing suddenly at the back of a nearby rolling chair when the station teetered dangerously around him. For now, though, he should probably call a cab.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Just a note: I’ve got another fic up next on my list of updates so you may not see more of this one for two or so weeks at least.
> 
> Also, even though I know it’s supposedly going the way of the dinosaur, feel free to drop me some Grimm prompts over on Tumblr, @rrrebeccabee.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Plenty of people’s friends call them when they’re in the hospital.”
> 
> Hank snorted, half-amused, half-irritated.
> 
> “Nick,” he said, pointed but not unkind, “you only have like two friends, man, and I’m one of them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene is a tag for episode 1x08 “Game Ogre,” because no way could I leave that recovery period alone.
> 
> As always, this is just a goofy Hank POV exploration of the Nick/Monroe dynamic that I’m writing for fun, and as such it has not been beta read. I welcome corrections where I have made errors and also invite y’all to share questions or prompts for other Nick/Monroe or other Grimm content you’d like to see, in this story or others.

An elephant gun.

Hank owed his life to a firearm developed at the turn of the century, of all things. And, of course, to the mysterious vigilante who’d fired the thing from somewhere in the overgrown grasses surrounding the quarry. The latter, at least, he had begun to form some semblance of a theory about, but the former was still pulling him up short. _An_ _elephant_ _gun_.

Admittedly, he’d only had about two minutes to avail himself of the knowledge that his savior - for want of a better term - had been toting a hundred-year-old, custom made big game rifle, whereas he’d been chewing on his suspicions about the shooter’s identity for a couple of days, but he was still irritated by his mind’s stubborn refusal to leap into action. His brain had been stalling out like an engine in need of repair since he realized that Oleg Stark was free of prison and on a bloody rampage through the streets of Portland. Stress would do that, and Hank was certain that the headache that had been stubbornly beating against his temples from the second Stark’s meaty fist made contact with his face wasn’t helping any.

“How’s Burkhardt holding up?”

Hank glanced over at the Captain from where he was studying one of the deformed bullets lying on the desk, blinking for a moment as he forced his mind to switch gears from investigation to small talk. Renard was watching him coolly, his fingers steepled together and resting absently in front of him, chin lifted and eyes sharp with polite, concerned interest. It was something of a jarring alteration in the flow of conversation, but Renard had always been brusque, preferring to cut straight to the heart of the matter where possible. It was one of his more admirable qualities - Hank could barely abide it when his peers beat too frequently around the bush, let alone his superiors. He lifted one shoulder in a shrug and let out a sigh.

“Fine?” he offered, a little helplessly. “He seemed okay when I saw him last night.”

Nick had been all swaddled up in bandages and blankets and an old PPD hoodie Juliette must have smuggled him from home. He’d spent the majority of Hank’s visit bitching about the caliber of the food available and half-doped on pain meds, besides, opining that it was ridiculous that the hospital staff insisted on holding him for observation in case of any internal bleeding and to monitor his severe concussion.

“Pissed he can’t be at work,” Hank added around the ghost of a laugh, cutting the Captain a rueful grin.

Renard chuckled to himself and ducked his head to mask his amusement. It was no secret that the Captain had a bit of a soft spot for Nick, hard as he worked to abstain from exhibiting any favoritism.

“That sounds like Nick,” he agreed, with a wry shake of his head. He parted his hands, reaching with one to collect the three disfigured slugs and scoop them up, while he drummed the fingers of the other against his leather desk topper.

“Maybe you ought to pick his brain on this one,” the Captain suggested, tipping the evidence back into its bag and sealing it with a couple of slick, practiced movements. He smirked, conspiratorial, and offered the baggie to Hank. “Give him something to think about so he doesn’t go out of his mind watching daytime television.”

“Man,” Hank drawled, shaking his head and grinning, “if I never have to hear him talking about Maury again it’ll be too soon.”

It was, of course, a lie.

Hank would happily loiter at Nick’s bedside and bask in his energetic berating of reality television contestants for as long as Nick had the breath to complain, simply because a Nick who was whining about the moral caliber of the human race was a Nick who was still here, a Nick who had gone toe to toe with a monster like Oleg Stark and somehow, miraculously, survived.

The Captain certainly understood the sentiment - you didn’t work your way to his position without running up against a few close calls, yourself, after all. He shared a quick, knowing gaze with Hank and then leaned back in his chair, brow furrowing and amiable smirk unfurling. He curled his fingers around the blunt ends of either armrest, casually slinging one leg over the other so his ankle caught against his knee.

He considered Hank for a long, sedate moment and asked, somewhat reluctantly, “How has he been besides the concussion?”

“Sir?” Hank responded, letting his face flatten out into the picture of placid confusion. It was a tactic he employed frequently during interrogations, though it frustrated his suspects into fits nearly as often as it diffused the tension. Luckily, the Captain was a man of almost inhumanly even temper, so he simply made a soft, chuffing noise that might have been a laugh, and dipped his head in acknowledgment of Hank’s somewhat ham-fisted deflection.

Hank thought he could be forgiven for not operating at the top of his game, barely two days out from one of the more harrowing nights of his career with his ears still ringing and body aching every other breath. Renard didn’t seem inclined to push, anyway, for which Hank was eminently grateful. He was still riding cresting waves of adrenaline, itching for a fight half the time and too paranoid to turn a corner blind otherwise.

The Captain just spread his palms, fingers wide and placating.

“He’s not in any trouble,” Renard assured, and Hank had to bite back a lightning-quick rebuttal demanding to know if the Captain was really confident in that assessment. “He’s just seemed... _distracted_ , as of late. I wanted to make sure everything else was alright. Nothing going on at home? Nothing he needs any extra support on?”

It wasn’t out of the ordinary for the Captain to be raising his concerns - Hank had been similarly prodded back during his rookie years, when his mentor, Detective Howard, had been hitting the bottle a little too hard, but it raised his hackles all the same. Of course Captain Renard had noticed Nick being weird. Nick was being weird - for a given definition of the term, since Nick had always been a little on the strange side - but he deserved the chance to work through it himself, with Hank’s help if he would take it, before it became an official mark on his record.

It wasn’t like Hank even had any concrete proof to support any of his theories explaining Nick’s bizarre behavior, and there was no good way to announce to your superior that your partner was keeping company you weren’t sure was good for him without feeling like an elementary school tattler. Besides, the last thing either of them needed before Hank had the opportunity to sit and talk it out with Nick himself was for Hank to voice his suspicion that Nick had somehow talked the aforementioned questionable company into killing a man on Hank’s behalf, which was highly criminal regardless of how much Stark had deserved it.

Somehow Hank doubted that Nick would be especially receptive to his concerns if his weird clock-making buddy was sweating it out in a holding cell whenever Hank managed to pin him down long enough to try and wrestle answers out of him.

Hank made a show of considering Renard’s questions that wasn’t likely to win him any awards for best performance, and the Captain thankfully didn’t push when he shook his head and responded slowly, “No. No, not that I can think of.”

He caught Hank’s eye for a long, pointed moment, during which Hank sat still and confident as a statue thanks to years of practice, overwhelmed with silent relief that Captain Renard couldn’t possibly see from this angle how white Hank’s knuckles were where he was clutching the armrests of his chair, evidence bag crushed tightly in one hand.

“Alright,” the Captain allowed after a beat that seemed to stretch out into eternity. He waved Hank away with a hand. “You going to see him this evening?”

“Yes sir,” Hank confirmed, tucking the little bag of bullets shakily into his jacket pocket and rising from his seat with a wince. Captain Renard nodded.

“Give him my regards?”

“Sure thing.” Hank took a cautious step toward the door and tried not to look too surprised when his legs didn’t go to jelly underneath him. His knees felt wobbly, the way they always had when he was a kid, getting away with lying to his parents. He had his fingers wrapped around the handle to Renard’s office, the knob half-turned when the Captain spoke again.

“And, Hank?”

He turned, to find those pale hazel eyes pinned coolly to his face.

“If anything comes to mind,” Renard said, and let the words sit between them for a long breath, to ensure that Hank caught his meaning, “let me know.”

Hank swallowed, throat dry, and nodded. The door closed behind him with a barely there click, but Hank still nearly jumped at the sound.

It wasn’t a threat.

That would be ridiculous, the Captain of the precinct strong-arming one detective into ratting out another, not least of which because Captain Renard had constructed his entire reputation on his genteel demeanor and decency. It wasn’t exactly a warning, either, and while Hank wholeheartedly believed that when the Captain said he wanted Hank to bring any peculiarities in Nick’s behavior to his attention, his intentions to act on said information were good, he couldn’t quite shake the thought that there motivations at play here he didn’t entirely understand.

He scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed, only stopping by his desk long enough to pick up his cell phone and a couple of case files he wanted to review.

It was high time to get out of here and go check in on his unbelievably lucky fool of a partner.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

“An _elephant_ _gun?_ ”

Nick peered disbelievingly over the top of the evidence bag, blue eyes wide and guileless. Hank couldn’t quite tell whether Nick was actually laying it on way too thick, or whether Hank’s own paranoia was making him especially mistrustful of his partner’s claim to ignorance.

“That’s what I said, man,” he agreed with a shrug. “Who even owns an elephant gun nowadays, let alone carts it out in the middle of the night to take potshots at brawling strangers?”

Nick shook his head and cut Hank a grin.

“The guy who saved your life, apparently,” he supplied, reaching out to hand the evidence bag back. It was a slow, awkward movement, and Nick kept his free arm curled protectively around his ribs as he leaned forward. He didn’t wince too badly, so Hank let him exert himself without complaint, meeting him a little more than halfway to pluck the baggie from his grasp so he didn’t have to stretch too far.

“Or girl,” he said casually, turning the bag over in his hands.

Nick blinked, confused. “What?”

“The shooter could have been female,” Hank explained, holding the bag up and giving it a little shake. It was statistically unlikely, which they both knew, but Nick nodded, slow, and didn’t argue.

”Sure,” he agreed. “Could have been.”

Hank pressed his lips into a thin line, considering for a second.

“Unless,” he offered curiously, “you know something I don’t know.”

It was a touch too solemnly delivered to land as a joke, but Nick’s face shuttered as if it had been an outright accusation. Of what, Hank didn’t exactly know. Probably Nick wasn’t entirely sure what he thought Hank was trying to imply, either, with that morphine line still dripping steadily into his arm.

He leaned back into the pile of pillows behind him, crossing his arms over his chest and asking shortly, “What are you trying to say?”

Hank sighed, folding forward so that his elbows were digging sharp into his knees and letting his head drop toward his chest. His head was swimming with all the responses he could make, all of the harsh truths he could lay at Nick’s feet.

There was the way Nick had been running off on his own more and more frequently, as though Hank wouldn’t notice that he wasn’t actually checking up on warrants and digital footprints and coroner’s reports like he claimed he was. There was his disappearing at night to work cases without backup, when Hank was only ever a short phonecall and maybe a couple minutes’ worth of polite banter away. There was the spacey distraction that Nick had suddenly started exhibiting around the time his aunt passed, or the weird aggression toward some of their persons of interest that Hank had never known him to possess before. And, of course, there was the fact that he was hanging around some weirdo clock-maker, that he was dragging the guy into investigations with him, had maybe even coaxed him into committing a murder. 

He swallowed every one of them down, into the pit of irritation sizzling to life in his gut.

He didn’t want to argue with Nick, hadn’t meant to put him on the offensive. He shook his head.

“I don’t know, man,” he said, peering up to where Nick was watching him warily, mouth pursed into an uncomfortable line. He sat back up, waving a hand and slipping the evidence back into his pocket. “I didn’t mean - ”

He was interrupted by the sudden, sharp shrill of Nick’s phone. Both of them jumped, staring at each other with wide, terrified eyes for a frozen second, and just like that the tension melted away, humor flooding in to take its place.

Hank pressed his knuckles to his mouth and huffed a laugh into his fist, while Nick chuckled and dug around in his sheets, awkwardly attempting to excavate his phone. He glanced down at the screen, then flickered a gaze over to Hank and thumbed it silent.

“Whoever it was,” he posited, “you’re lucky they were there.”

“I am,” Hank agreed immediately. He leaned back in his seat, clicking his tongue mournfully. “Wish I knew who he was. I owe the guy a fruit basket at least.”

He raised his eyebrows pointedly at Nick, who smiled a tight, placid smile, and replied, “Or girl.”

“Or girl,” Hank repeated, without malice. Nick’s phone abruptly began chirping again and he turned it over, sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose when he checked the caller I.D.

“You mind?” he asked, holding his phone up with the back toward Hank and wagging it back and forth. Hank shook his head and waved a hand in permission, sprawling back in his seat and casting his gaze toward the ceiling to provide at least the illusion of privacy.

“Hey,” Nick greeted, low and wary, while Hank tried not see him shooting cautious glances in Hank’s direction. “Now’s not really a good time.”

Between the distance and the ambient chorus of the hospital’s intensive care ward, Hank couldn’t quite make out the voice on the other end of the phone, only that it was at a lower register than say, Juliette’s would have been.

“I’m fine,” Nick assured whoever was on the other line - Hank could make a pretty damn good guess as to the mystery caller’s identity, but from the way that Nick had curled his shoulders in and subtly angled his body away from Hank he was clearly trying to keep it under wraps. Briefly, Hank considered calling out a greeting to Monroe anyway, just to see the look on Nick’s face when he did it, but he truly hadn’t come to stir the pot. Not today, when Nick was still half-blasted on a morphine drip and his bruises looked even uglier than they had the night they happened.

Nick made a quiet, amused sound.

“Yeah, well, they’ve got me on the good drugs,” he said, and paused to listen to probably-Monroe’s response. He grinned, rolling his eyes, and amended, “They’re not _that_ good.”

Hank laced his fingers together, tapping his thumbs against one another and casually started to count the ceiling tiles.

“No, no, you don’t need to do that,” he sighed. “I’ll pick them up when I’m out.”

He flashed another look in Hank’s direction and, reasonably soothed by the effort Hank was expending to craft a facade of privacy, uncurled a bit to sink back into his pillows with a grunt.

“Sometime tomorrow, as long as nothing unexpected crops up.” He snorted. “No, I’ve got it covered. But thanks. Yeah. I’ll catch you later.”

He swiped his phone off and tucked it away, picking absently at the sheets over his lap and waiting a few seconds to meet Hank’s eye.

Hank stared for a long moment and then asked, “Juliette?”

It was a token, more than anything. They both knew it wasn’t Juliette who had called, and Nick didn’t look especially relieved to be offered the out. He was frowning down at his bedclothes, worrying at something in his mouth in that way he did when he was confronted with a difficult decision. For a brief, stomach-churning moment, Hank thought he might actually try and play it off as though it _had_ been Juliette on the line. He wasn’t quite certain what he would do if Nick insulted his intelligence so egregiously, but he could guarantee that it wouldn’t be pretty.

Luckily, Nick just tightened his jaw, tilted his gaze back up, and sighed reluctantly, “No, it was, uh. Monroe.”

“Monroe,” Hank parroted, raising his eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Nick said, brisk and with a slight edge to his words. “He heard about what happened and I guess it freaked him out, being involved in something like this. He wanted to make sure I was alright.”

Hank canted his head back and forth, considering.

“I didn’t realize you guys were tight like that.”

“We’re not tight,” Nick scoffed immediately, and to his credit the rebuttal seemed genuine. Hank shot him a deeply skeptical look, even so.

“Tight enough the dude has your personal phone number,” he observed. Nick sighed through his nose and rolled his eyes.

“It’s not - ” he started, and then cut himself off with a little, irritated breath. He peered intently over at Hank.

“I felt bad for getting him all tangled up in the kidnapping thing,” he explained.

His blue gaze was sparkling with so much sincerity that Hank was suddenly, inarguably certain Nick was bending the truth, at best, if he wasn’t lying outright to Hank’s face. It was an alarming display of deceptive competence, coming from a guy who’d been wringing his hands with concern over how he was ever going to keep his engagement ring a secret a few short months ago. It made Hank’s chest ache.

“I gave him my number in case anyone hassled him about it after the fact. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t ruin the guy’s life.”

“He must get hassled a lot, if you two have gotten so close he’s calling you in the hospital.”

Nick hunched his shoulders defensively up toward his ears.

“Plenty of people’s friends call them when they’re in the hospital.”

Hank snorted, half-amused, half-irritated.

“Nick,” he said, pointed but not unkind, “you only have like two friends, man, and I’m one of them.”

“Gee, Hank,” Nick muttered, “don’t be too generous, there. My ego may never recover.”

“The other one is Wu,” Hank continued breezily.

“That’s just willfully cruel.”

“And,” Hank carried on, right over the top of Nick’s bitchy asides, “we can probably count Juliette in there, too. She likes you.”

“She better,” Nick agreed, a subtle tone of alarm bleeding through his words. “She’s been dating me for years, it would be _literally_ insane if she didn’t like me at least a little bit.”

“All I’m saying is, _people_ might have plenty of friends to ring them up while they’re convalescing but _you_ aren’t one of those people.”

“Maybe I’m becoming one of those people,” Nick shot back. “Maybe I’m evolving into a beautiful, extroverted butterfly.”

“Maybe you are,” Hank allowed. He shrugged. “All I know is that forty-eight hours ago, you were fairly adamant that you and Monroe were strictly _not_ friends, but that relationship appears to have been reclassified sometime in the interim.”

Nick glared. He opened his mouth, made a vague and garbled consonant sound that might have been the beginning of a word, and then let his mouth snap shut again. Hank crossed his arms triumphantly over his chest and tried not to look too smug.

“We’re really not friends,” Nick insisted, after he’d quietly fumed for a few minutes. “You know I’m not great with that stuff. He’s just a nice, kinda high strung guy who’s helped me out a couple of times.”

His voice was small in a way that leeched all the joy out of Hank’s hard-earned entrapment. Hank pinched irritably at the bridge of his nose.

“Look, man,” he sighed. “You’re a fine friend, a great one, even, under the right circumstances.”

”This has been, really, so good for my self-esteem,” Nick interrupted. Hank ignored him.

”I’m glad you’re meeting new people, even if they are vaguely suspicious and deeply strange hippie timepiece enthusiasts.”

“Horofiles,” Nick supplied absently. Hank frowned.

“What?”

“Clock enthusiasts are called horofiles. Or, some of them call themselves that, anyway.” He scrunched his face thoughtfully. “I don’t know if it’s like, an _official_ title, but that’s what Monroe calls it.”

“You see?” Hank said, throwing himself out of his chair, he was so quick to gesture at Nick. “You say you’re not friends with the guy and then you drop this kind of shit.”

“I pick up one minor factoid from one of his rambling monologues on clocks and suddenly we’re swapping BFF necklaces?”

Hank stared at Nick, unimpressed.

“You knew where his coffee cups were, man.” He shook his head and fell back into his seat, tilting his face toward the ceiling and scrubbing his palms over it a few times in the hopes of alleviating some of his frustration. “At first I thought the whole thing was kind of fishy, but now I’ll admit I’m mostly freaked out that you won’t just admit to it.”

“Fine!” Nick threw his hands up. “Fine! We’re friends! There! Are you happy? Can we quit with the interrogation now?”

Hank was shocked silent long enough that he worried he might not ever speak again.

“I mean, I still have some questions - ” he started to say, hoarse and wobbly, once he’d finally recaptured his voice. Nick cut him off with a bitter little laugh, darker and more brittle than Hank had ever heard from him before.

“Hank, buddy,” he said, desperation tearing at the edges of his words, “I think we both have plenty of questions on this one we’d _really_ rather not answer.”

His gaze was sharp and heavy with meaning. He didn’t breathe so much as a word about tapes or missing evidence or conspiracies but Hank flinched as though he had. He swallowed, throat aching around a knot of guilt, and spread his hands in surrender.

“That’s fair,” he allowed, even though it hurt like coughing up glass to say the words aloud. He glanced over at Nick, tucked up in his hospital bed looking stricken, bruises and scrapes vivid against his too-pale skin, expression harassed and vaguely hunted.

This wasn’t what Hank had meant for this visit to be.

He took a long, slow breath and clapped his palms to his thighs, dragging them up and down his jeans in a couple of quick, easy passes as he pushed himself to his feet.

“What d’you say we put this one to bed, for now?” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the curtain at his back that separated them from the rest of the ward. “I’ll see about smuggling you a hamburger from Ralph’s and we both pretend the last twenty minutes never happened. Deal?”

Nick collapsed back against his pillows and nodded, grateful grin splitting his face and making his lips curl.

“Deal,” he sighed. He lifted his eyebrows, smile morphing from painfully relieved to impishly playful, and added, “You figure out how to get some of those duck fat fries in here and I’ll nominate you for sainthood.”

Hank waved a hand at him, ducking past the curtain and tossing his response over his shoulder.

“I’ve earned sainthood twelve times over already, looking out for your sorry ass.”

He flashed an apologetic smirk to a nearby nurse who was scowling disapprovingly at his conduct and basked in the sound of Nick’s laughter trailing him out into the hall.

Nick was alive, and he was happy, and he was healing. For the moment, that was all that mattered. Everything else would keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, look! I haven’t forgotten about this guy. I’m gonna try to wrap it up in the next couple of days because I have some other stuff I want to get to - both in the Grimm fandom and elsewhere - and the shame of living with a bunch of unfinished fic hanging over me is starting to get uncomfortable.
> 
> This chapter is a tag for episode 1x12 “Last Grimm Standing.” Unbeta’ed, but I hope you enjoy it even so.

“Damn but this is a mess,” Hank sighed, scrubbing at his face with his hands and blinking blearily at the screen of his computer.

Paperwork was easily the least glamorous part of being a homicide detective, but it wasn’t something Hank usually minded. Cases were won and lost by paperwork, and it didn’t have to be his favorite part of his job for him to understand its importance or respect its necessity. Fortunately, it was rare that a case required quite the volume of filing that this particular investigation had accrued.

It was like something out of a movie: your friendly neighborhood parole officer secretly operating a brutal underground fight club.

Taymor was still in the wind, which was especially disheartening considering the fact that he and Nick had been seated a desk away from the man, trading polite but stilted conversation, less than seventy-two hours before. Nick had been jumpy and distracted since Hank and Sgt. Franco rolled up with the cavalry the night prior to free him from the iron cage where he’d apparently assaulted another man to the point of unconsciousness.

Dimitri Skantos was rapidly recuperating at St. Joe’s and thankfully didn’t seem inclined to press charges, too preoccupied with fighting the manslaughter allegations Captain Renard had insisted on pinning him with.

Time would tell whether Nick was going to be officially disciplined for the actions he’d taken during the brawl, but everyone in the precinct seemed to feel that he had a pretty solid argument for self-defense, and despite his recent twitchiness Nick didn’t seem altogether concerned about it.

Hank still wasn’t clear as to precisely _why_ Nick had ended up agreeing to participate in the fighting ring in the first place, and his partner was being maddeningly tight-lipped on the subject. It was nice to have Nick back, of course, but it seemed like the bruises and contusions left by Oleg Stark had barely healed before he was throwing himself headlong into some new and harrowing peril.

It assuaged Hank’s lingering guilt on the matter of Stark at the same time that it raised an alarm for entirely different reasons. Hank had seen what happened to cops who started playing too fast and loose with their own mortality. It very rarely ended well for any party involved.

“Tell me about it,” Nick muttered, flicking a commiserating glance over to Hank’s desk from where he was methodically plodding his way through his own teetering pile of witness statements and forensics reports.

“You think we’ll catch him?”

“Doubtful,” Nick sighed, leaning back in his seat and scrubbing a hand tiredly over his jaw. “We’ll be lucky if he hasn’t skipped town already.”

“Where’s the ol’ Burkhardt optimism?” Hank replied, grinning. “That rookie detective magic is gonna pull through for you, just you watch. We’ll get him.”

Nick snorted, shaking his head.

“No magic,” he assured, leaning in to scrawl something onto a sticky note and press it to the inside of the file folder currently splayed open atop his computer keyboard. “Just good old-fashioned police work.”

“Plus, you got the hook-ups,” Hank agreed, turning his attention back to his own work. Written statements were always something of a crapshoot, but at least this one was mostly legible, if not especially compelling. The average spectator of illegal cage fighting tended to lack a certain amount of authorial flair.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hank lifted his gaze to find Nick staring him down with a curious, vaguely disappointed frown. Hank arched an eyebrow.

“Monrroe,” he said. The furrow between Nick’s brow sunk in deeper.

“What about him?”

“He busted the whole case wide open, didn’t he?”

The smile Nick flashed him was slightly queasy, and didn’t do much to counteract the sudden, glassy tension in his gaze.

“How would he have done that?” Nick asked shortly, dropping his eyes back to his paperwork. “He wasn’t even there.”

So, Hank thought resignedly, his partner was lying. Again. And _badly,_ too.

If Hank hadn’t been offended on his own behalf, he might have been offended on Nick’s for putting up such a pisspoor performance. They were homicide detectives, for God’s sake - it was a wonder that Nick had ever managed to make it through an interrogation if this was the best he could do at serious prevarication. Hank flattered himself to consider that maybe Nick was having such a difficult time because he was ashamed of lying to Hank, in particular, but he’d seen Nick flub his way through enough badly-concocted excuses to a rotating cast of complete strangers and casual acquaintances in the last few weeks that he knew this wasn’t the case.

“Didn’t say he was,” he offered blandly. “He tipped you off to the location, though, right?”

“Oh,” Nick said, the tight line of his shoulders unspooling cautiously to slack, sloping relief. It would almost have been funny if it wasn’t both desperately sad and deeply insulting. “Oh, yeah he did. He knows this guy, you know?”

“The bookie, sure,” Hank agreed easily.

“It’s not just - ” Nick shook his head in a short, sharp jerk. “Monroe’s very active in the community,” he insisted, cutting a cagey little glance in Hank’s direction. “He knows a lot of people.”

Hank should have let it go, should have accepted Nick’s ham-fisted hedging and moved on, but he was still nursing his frustration over the whole Oleg Stark debacle. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that Nick had sent his stick bug lumberjack out with a hundred-year-old firearm to ‘take care’ of the problem while Nick was laid up in the hospital, doped up on prescription painkillers. It rankled both Hank’s personal and professional sensibilities, not that he could prove Monroe’s involvement; or Nick’s, for that matter, though Hank was fairly certain his chances were a little better there, at least.

His festering irritation was compounded by the fact that every witness statement from the Taymor case that Hank had entered into the system so far had made mention of a man matching Monroe’s general description being in the cage with Nick before the cops arrived. Some of them even asserted that possibly-Monroe had been in the cage before Nick himself had even gotten there, and that Nick had climbed in on possibly-Monroe’s behalf at Taymor’s goading, willingly handing over his gun and not bothering to wait for back-up.

Befriending a since-absolved person of interest was strange, sure, but forgivable as a quirk of personality. Approaching said person on the sly for help with police cases was stranger, still, but ultimately understandable - if a little foolish - considering the delicacy of the cases and the expertise of the persons involved.

Encouraging said person to actively participate in a police investigation, or worse, aiding and abetting said person in eluding arrest for their involvement in a criminal activity? Those waters were decidedly murkier, and Hank didn’t appreciate Nick’s lack of consideration for the way his actions might tarnish Hank’s reputation by association, let alone how they could tank his own - and likely would, at this rate. So, instead of keeping his lip buttoned, Hank asked dryly, “Are they all criminals, or does he have a book club, too?”

Nick scowled at him, wounded. “That’s not fair.”

“Mysterious bookie,” Hank provided, holding up one finger, then two, then three as he spoke. “Hap Lasser. Hap Lasser’s hot, homicidal sister.” There was almost certainly another handful, at least, of suspects and/or victims that Nick was keeping mum about, though Hank didn’t think it would be in his best interests to bring that up right now.

“Angelina,” Nick muttered, staring into the middle distance while his mouth screwed up like he smelled something foul. After a second of quiet, intense brooding, he focused his gaze back on Hank and added, “That’s one person of interest and an unlucky guy who drew the attention of a serial arsonist. Having bad luck with childhood friends hardly makes him Don Corleone.”

“So he’s just a well-meaning clockmaker who keeps a bookie on his speed dial?” Hank pressed. They were both intimately acquainted with the kind of man who befriended a bookie - a gentle and savory character didn’t generally top the list of defining traits in pathological gamblers.

Nick’s mouth went thin and stern, lower lip tucked in that stubborn way that signified he was determined to give no quarter.

“He only met the bookie because I asked him to look into a lead,” he snapped. It was an instinctual, thoughtless response, and Nick realized precisely what he’d said a spare second later, blue eyes going wide while regret flooded his features.

“If I ask why you had a clockmaker investigate a lead for you instead of, oh,” Hank shrugged and gestured vaguely to himself, “your _partner_ , who also happens to be a _police detective,_ you gonna tell me?”

Nick clenched his jaw, chin jutting forward. He tore his eyes away from Hank’s, slate-dark gaze settling somewhere on his desk.

“Yeah,” Hank huffed, shaking his head. The curl of his smirk felt sharp like a sneer. “Didn’t think so.”

“I don’t know why you’re so hung up on Monroe,” Nick muttered, glaring at his paperwork.

Hank stared at him, until the weight of it pricked Nick’s attention and drew his eyes back up.

“Maybe because _you_ are?”

“I am what?” Nick asked irritably.

“Obsessed with the guy?”

Nick scoffed. “I’m not _obsessed_ , he’s just - ” Nick shook his head, pressing his mouth into a flat, unhappy line. “It’s complicated.”

“Sounds like it,” Hank agreed. Nick narrowed his eyes, rightfully suspicious of Hank’s easy acquiescence. Hank sighed and leaned forward, explaining quietly, “Listen, man, I don’t know what’s going on with you.”

Nick open his mouth to speak, but Hank held up a hand, flashing him a dark, warning glare, and he let it fall shut again.

“Don’t try to tell me it’s nothing. It’s obvious that _something’s_ going on. And you don’t want to tell me what it is? That’s fine.” He ignored the painful little clench of his heart and pressed on, “That ever changes, you know I’m here to listen, but in the meantime, you need to think about how this looks.”

“How _what_ looks?” Nick snapped, apparently incapable of holding his tongue any longer.

It took a tremendous application of willpower to keep Hank from rolling his eyes.

“You pin this guy for a kidnapping out of _nowhere,_ howling up and down about how you know he did it even though you don’t have any proof.” Nick flinched, clearly still embarrassed by his rabid insistence of Monroe’s guilt all those months ago. Another mystery of their bizarre friendship that he’s never bothered to explain, much to Hank’s irritation. “And then, next thing you know, you’re linking arms with the guy and dragging him along on cases, sharing confidential information with him, having him follow up your leads.”

“He just - he knows a lot of random stuff,” Nick said weakly. “He has weird hobbies.”

“Nick, man,” Hank intoned somberly, “believe me when I say there is almost nothing in the world I want to know about less than what your murder-friend likes to do in his free time.”

“He’s not - ”

“A murderer? I know,” Hank assured. He considered. “Or, I believe that _you_ don’t think he is, anyway. I’m kinda still on the fence.”

Nick appeared decidedly unimpressed by this clarification.

“I’m just saying,” Hank continued purposefully, “it looks suspicious when you’re sharing confidences with someone outside the department when you got a perfectly good partner sitting right here next to you. It might be different if it was your wife or something, but this dude isn’t even a CI.” He leaned back in his seat and added, at a more normal volume, “That’s a mistake, by the way. If Monroe is helping you out as often as it seems like he is, you need to get him registered, like, _yesterday,_  before a prosecutor with the sense to look into our records rails us over him.”

Nick ignored him, chewing on some other thought for a long, angry second before he looked up, blue eyes blazing, and hissed, “So, what? People think I’m dirty?”

This wasn’t a conversation they should be having in the middle of the bullpen, even with the usual raucous hubbub of a busy police station masking their voices, but Hank figured he might as well go for broke since he had Nick on the line already, anyway.

“Not as such,” he drawled. He felt a little mean but mostly just spitefully satisfied when he confessed bluntly, “They think you’re fucking.”

‘They’ was, admittedly, something of a stretch. Aside from Hank’s own overblown suspicions on the matter - namely that Nick had a crush he didn’t quite recognize or know what to do about - it was only Sergeant Wu who had insinuated an intimate relationship between the two men. Hank was fairly certain that had been largely in jest, but Nick didn’t need to know that.

He looked positively gobsmacked by this assertion, mouth dropped open into a perfect, surprised ‘o,’ eyes wide and horrified. Good, Hank thought with a mean jolt of victory. Nick deserved to squirm a little.

He gaped like a fish for a moment and finally managed, after a few failed attempts, to choke, “I - we - we’re not!”

Hank raised his eyebrows and held his palms out.

“I’m just telling you what I heard.”

 _This,_ he wanted to say smugly, while Nick’s confused blue gaze dropped, wary and unseeing, to the clutter on his desk, _is how you lie, Burkhardt._

“I can’t - ” Nick gritted, small and angry and helpless. It wasn’t a tone that suited him. “I’m with _Juliette._ I would never - ”

“I know,” Hank cut in, because whatever else Nick may or may not be guilty of, he wasn’t the type to step out on his significant other, regardless of whatever infatuation he may be feeling for someone else. “It’s just rumors. I thought you oughta be aware.”

“Yeah,” Nick said absently. “Thanks.”

He didn’t sound very grateful, but Hank supposed he couldn’t blame him. There’d been an uncomfortable tension in the air between them since the throwdown-that-wasn’t back when Nick was still in the hospital, and, as these things sometimes did, it had finally caught on a rough edge. It happened, when you spent as much time as he and Nick did in one another’s company. Partnering on the force was worse, in a lot of ways, than having siblings.

If Hank had his way about it, he and Nick would go somewhere nice and quiet so they could scream at each other and maybe duke it out a bit, but Nick, in his usual emotionally repressed fashion, seemed utterly determined not to acknowledge his bizarre relationship with the clockmaker at all. Hank glanced over to where Nick was staring dazedly at his computer screen, worriedly gnawing at his lower lip, and felt a twinge of regret.

“Look, man,” he said gently, “I didn’t mean - ”

“No, it’s fine,” Nick assured, cutting into Hank’s apology and shaking his head. “You were right. I needed to know.” The smile he flashed was a shadow of the real thing, peeling away from his teeth like a grimace and not even skimming the distracted shadows in his eyes. “Thanks for telling me.”

He shuffled a stack of papers together and pushed himself to his feet, hooking a thumb awkwardly over his shoulder.

“I’m just gonna go follow up on a couple of things. Maybe get some lunch,” he explained, which was a more gracious exit than Hank had expected him to make, distressed as he very obviously was.

“Sure,” Hank nodded, and didn’t do either of them the disservice of asking if Nick wanted company. The gratitude in Nick’s face upon Hank’s allowance was real, at least, brittle and drawn-taut though it may have been.

Hank watched him go, frowning when Nick pulled his cell phone out of his pocket as he turned the corner and wondering against his better judgment who, precisely, Nick was planning to call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And lo, we circle ever closer to Hank finally losing his cool and Nick having to face his feelings~
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [@rrrebeccabee](https://rrrebeccabee.tumblr.com) if you’d like to come prompt me or flail about Grimm with me or whatevz.
> 
> Thank you for reading! <33

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! <33


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